Table phone or desk phone?

For many years the phones made by major North American manufacturers (other than GTE) were nearly identical, and usually followed AT&T's designs.

Strangely, the follow-the-leader game did not always apply to product descriptions.

This photo of phone boxes from the early 1980s shows that AT&T considered phones designed for use on horizontal surfaces to be "table phones," but the ITT (later Cortelco) and Comdial (previously Stromberg-Carlson) models were "desk phones."